No HTML Experience Needed* (So Says SiteGrinder)

A non-programmer friend forwarded me a CSS file that was causing him some grief. After looking at the css and the target html, I suggested his first problem was forgetting the “Cascading” in “Cascading Style Sheets.” I suggested telling his coder to start with a style reset from either Tripoli or Yahoo, and then clean up the invalid HTML.

A few hours later came the question “how do I do that in SiteGrinder.” Whowaswhatzit? “Yeah, well, I dropped my web guy. We create all our web pages in PhotoShop.”

I popped over to the SiteGrinder site, and immediately saw that in their world, there was no need to worry about setting proper fonts. Here is what I saw using FireFox 3 on Linux:

SiteGrinder Oops

*SiteGrinder 2 turns Adobe Photoshop into an easy-to-use and powerful website design and production tool. It’s true! In fact, a SiteGrinder 2-equipped designer with no HTML expertise needs only their Photoshop skills to go from design concept to full deployment of a professional, standards-compliant website in just minutes with no programming whatsoever … and they do it all from within Photoshop. SiteGrinder 2 takes care of everything, even ensuring cross-platform browser compatibility. Best of all, pages created with SiteGrinder 2 retain the exact look and layout of the parent Photoshop file from which they were created.

Amazing!

Well, at least there aren’t any multi-nested tables with rowspans and colspans and overstretched clear gifs. But its not quite baked yet. And as customers and users expect more dynamic interaction, intuitive responses, and solid SEO – the farther tools like SiteGrinder will fall behind.

One-man bands can impress, and even entertain on occasion. But they rarely make wonderful music. SiteGrinder is an impressive novelty act. Don’t bet your biz on it.

Originally uploaded by RW PhotoBug

Some other opinions:

Blogcritic: Software Review – Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop Support: SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
And of course, Softpedia

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You’re currently reading “No HTML Experience Needed* (So Says SiteGrinder),” an entry on PhilSpace

Published:: September 8, 2008 / 9:42 pm

Category:: content management, web design

Tags:: programming, xhtml

reggie 9.9.08 / 4pm

and as customers and users expect more dynamic interaction, intuitive responses, and solid SEO – the farther tools like SiteGrinder will fall behind.

I disagree. The more complex website creation becomes and the more demands are put upon websites, then the more useful tools like these become.

SiteGrinder, Joomla, MODx, WordPress, Blogger, ZenCart, Magenta, RapidWeaver, MySpace, Facebook, Google Pages, the list goes on and on and on. At first, you may think these are all very different from one another, that they should not be compared, but all provide a large value by doing a lot for a user with no html experience. Some do SEO well, some do not. Some follow web standards, others do not. Some give users freedom of design, others are template driven. Most have trade-offs of one sort or another: functionality at the expense of standards, SEO at the expense of design, etc. None are perfect.

But, what is becoming increasingly clear to me as a coder, is that while I may be able to do better, by hand, anything done by those tools above, I cannot do it at the same cost or as expeditiously. Increasingly, I find it smarter to incorporate tools like those into my own offerings and workflow to stay competitive. I often bring value by improving upon or customizing the output of these tools, rather than foregoing them.

As to SiteGrinder, I can’t say, that’s not the type of sites I do. I’ve heard good things about it, but I’m sure it isn’t perfect. The main question should be: is it productive?

m 10.22.08 / 4pm

no offense but how many actually use linux except for servers?? im not sure maybe a lot but i dont know one person that does. So all that really matters is your general audience which is either windows or mac i know for fact it works in both.

Phil Barnhart 10.23.08 / 11am

“M” has a good point – but missed mine. It’s not about Linux. Its about creating valid, well-formed and functional XHTML and CSS. Lots of web sites “looked fine” until Firefox, or the iPhone/Safari, or IE7 came out. Lots of sites “look fine” but are absolute spaghetti to search engines and web tools.

And in fact several people emailed me links to their sites done in SiteGrinder that break in Safari . . .

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